Parallels 16 - Increase graphics card memory limit above 3Mb for Big Sur VM on Catalina host

Big Sur VM is unusable on Catalina host due to 3Mb graphics card limitation

Official statement from technical support:

Thank you for contacting Parallels Support.
This email is in regards to your graphic card usage in Big Sur Virtual machine.
In order to use maximum resources in Big Sur Virtual machine, Host OS should also be Big Sur due to the recent API implementation.
We are closing this ticket. Please get back to us if you have any other queries.
Thank you for choosing Parallels. Have a great day!

 

Hello,
Thank you for sharing your feedback with us.
We would like to inform you that on macOS Catalina host, macOS Big Sur Beta VM delivers the same experience as all macOS VMs in Parallels Desktop before - there is no Metal graphics acceleration, thus it doesn't really matter how much graphics memory the VM has - even if it would have 5GBs if would be useless.

In order to experience the new Metal accelerated graphics in macOS VMs you need to have macOS Big Sur installed on both host and VM. To achieve that, Parallels Desktop 16 uses a new macOS Big Sur technology that is absent in macOS Catalina or earlier.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions.